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Wednesday, March 20, 2013

As announced on Twitter yesterday, my paper titled "Professional Software Development Using Oracle Application Express" has been put online. I'm copying the first two paragraphs of the summary here, so you can decide if you want to read the rest as well:

Software development involves much more than just producing lines of code. It is also about version control, deployment to other environments, integrating code and unit testing. It is appropriate to the profession of software development to have a framework in place that handles all of this, in order for the developers to focus on the creative and fun part of their job: producing excellent and well-designed code. Without such a framework, you need to be cautious and deployments become more difficult and more error-prone. Which means more time and money needlessly spent and a development process which is less fun than it should be. Fortunately, these problems are well known and solutions are already widely adapted. However, in database application development in general and in APEX development specific, these practices are not so common, unfortunately. It is our belief that database and APEX development should not be treated different and deserve a similar framework. So that’s what we set out to do.

This paper describes how we develop new APEX applications in such a way that most of the effort does gets spent on actually developing the code. If you can take advantage of version control, if you can build and deploy your entire application in one step, can make a daily build to continuously integrate all developed code, and can make sure your developers have their own self-contained development environment, then the benefits are many. You’ll experience less errors, higher productivity and seamless software delivery from your team. Refactoring code becomes painless since you can easily be assured the changes won’t break the application. Overall quality goes up, ensuring a much longer lifetime of the application.